Twitch‘s Hype Chat feature has not lived up to its initial billing. The monetization option is being discontinued just five months after it was first introduced.
To announce its strategic shift, Twitch returned to the post it used to introduce Hype Chat back in June. In an update on that page, the Amazon-owned streaming hub announced that it would “deprecate” Hype Chat as it increases investments in alternative revenue streams like Cheering and Bits.
Hype Chat allowed channel subscribers to pay in order to pin their messages to the top of the chat window. Streamers could choose a price between $1 and $500 for each Hype Chat. The visibility of the messages depended on the price, with more expensive Hype Chats staying pinned for longer.
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Twitch gave Hype Chats a 70-30 revenue split in hopes of enticing creators to try out the feature. The 70-30 was controversially discontinued in 2022, though some streamers have since returned to that agreement.
But even with financial incentives baked in, the Twitch community didn’t take to Hype Chats. “From experiments we ran prior to launch, we believed that Hype Chat offered an easier way for viewers to support streamers – since it allowed a majority of viewers to directly purchase Hype Chats with their local currency,” reads Twitch’s post update. “However, we learned through community feedback after the launch that viewers saw more value in Cheering because it was easier to understand exactly how much streamers earned from Bits. Direct purchases through Hype Chat, made from a monetary amount instead of Bits, also made it more difficult to understand how much streamers were earning after currency conversion.”
Cheering, the chat-boosting Twitch feature that uses Bits as its currency, has been adapted across the social web. YouTube’s take on it is a tipping option called Super Thanks. A related revenue stream called Super Chats bears a strong resemblance to Hype Chats, though YouTube’s version is still available for streamers.
Twitch, for its own part, will have to continue developing new revenue streams if it hopes to keep up with the lucrative proposals made by its rivals. The company’s staffers will discuss the end of Hype Chats and other topics related to monetization in an upcoming installment of the Patch Notes talk show. The episode in question is due out on November 15.
